updated 09:15 pm EDT, Wed March 27, 2013

Rises three places in latest survey, gains 54 percent

Industry analyst ComScore has decided to include mobile web visits as well as desktop-and-notebook visits to its ranking of the web's most popular websites, causing a significant shift upwards in popularity for all websites but particularly for Apple.com. The change gave Apple a 54 percent gain in visitors, enough to move it from the 11th most popular website in the world to 8th place. The company saw a total of 115 million unique visitors on its site in February, though it still pales behind Google's amalgamated websites.

Google's diverse websites, when combined, saw nearly 236 million unique visitors in February and retained its usual top spot. However, given the enormous number of services and offerings from Google compared to Apple, the fact that the iPhone maker is seeing about half of Google's traffic is still quite significant. The shift to include mobile device numbers changed Google's ranking only seven percent, but Apple saw the highest gain of any of the top 10 websites.

Rounding out the top 10 were (in order) Yahoo's combined sites, Microsoft's combined sites, Facebook, Amazon's combined sites, AOL, vertical lifestyle and fashion sitemaker Glam Media, then Apple, rounded out by Wikipedia's combined sites and CBS Interactive. Nineteenth-ranked Pandora, 44th-place game maker Zynga and 47th-ranked Groupon all saw around 200 percent increases in their respective numbers as a result of including mobile users in the ratings.